Program
by dandeliondreams
Summary: Welcome to the Academy. Disjoint glimpses into the nightmare.


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_The Academy seeks to challenge and expand the minds and passions of the brightest students of the Allied Planets. With the most challenging curriculum in the known universe, and opportunities for pursuing independent study and research projects, the Academy is geared toward improving the minds of the most precocious of students. Because of our substantial government support, we can offer enormous depth and breadth of activity and opportunity for students of all interests, as well as access to the newest laboratory technology._

_Our one-of-a-kind educational community ultimately helps young people grow intellectually, athletically, and morally. We lead them to distinguish right from wrong and then do what is right so they can be courageous citizens. Smart and curious students from every planet in the Core interact with interplanetary professors and scholars who are also mentors, counselors, advisors and inspirations._

_We are here to challenge the minds, fire the imaginations, and train the bodies of the young people who have been entrusted to us._

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She wants to go home.

It's not exactly homesickness, but she doesn't have the right word to describe it yet, so homesickness it is.

She just feels strange here - perhaps it's the food.

The other students are rude and too socially awkward to string sentences together, or even make eye contact. They hunch over as if they could protect their egos with their bodies. She thought she would be happy away from the grad students, but her peers are just as insecure, perhaps more.

If she's entirely honest, she's been feeling a little insecure herself. A boy explained Estrel notation so succinctly she felt an unreasonable stir of jealousy. Petty, but she's been having trouble controlling her emotions recently.

Maybe it's because she can't vent at Simon anymore. Maybe it's because no one will dance with her, and the sound of music echoing in the empty room just makes her feel lonely. Maybe it's the food.

She's excited to see her roommate's violin, but it turns out she only plays mournful, contemplative pieces, pitched to sound like a human weeping.

The others just seem so...

It's the way they flinch when she passes by, if they're not expecting it, and reflexively wrap their arms around their core. It's the sound of someone sobbing, every night, in a different room. Sometimes they scream in their sleep.

She feels terrible for thinking it, but at least she's not the only one having nightmares.

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2

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The professors look at her strangely.

The Cortex claims they've done fundamental work in theoretical physics. But the way they talk - the way they think, even - gives them away. There's no spark of excitement in their eyes when they discuss field theory, though they try to hide it by talking fast and using exciting hand gestures.

They want things to be systems, to be organic. They aren't impressed by the workings of reality, they want biology. Neurobiology, if she's not mistaken. Something about them reminds her of Simon's classmates.

Not that there's anything wrong with being that sort of doctor, of course. It's just... Physics is better.

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3

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There was an accident. One of the security guards accidentally tripped her, and she fell on what might have been a broken pen. She needs a tetanus shot, said the note from Dr. Mathias. Please come to the infirmary at your earliest convenience.

All of the guards seem to wear the same empty expression, but she knows it wasn't an accident. Or maybe it was, and she's just reading too much into things, as Simon would say.

(As Simon would say, blushing and stuttering, before making her swear not to tell anyone, especially not that cute girl with the winning smile.)

The professional ballet teacher from Sihnon hasn't arrived yet, so they've replaced the dance lessons in her schedule with mixed martial arts and conditioning.

Even when typed on bland white flimsy, she knows a lie when she sees one.

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4

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It can't be the stress. She's been enjoying the classes, honestly, except conditioning. And the treatments.

The memories are hazy, but the splitting pain in her head tells her too much. There are scars above the base of her spine she doesn't remember getting.

Treatments. For what? Do they want to fix her? She's always seen things differently, but this - this is wrong. It hurts. And they're only making it worse.

Reality starts to chip away in technicolor shards.

At night, her roommate takes out her violin, only to stare at it in silence, tears rolling down her face. She doesn't respond to sound or touch, and acts like she can't remember in the morning.

She really doesn't remember, though - it's written all over her face, and the confusion in her eyes can't be faked.

So.

When people move out of eyeshot, she's no longer sure they exist.

She never really feels awake, like every waking moment is part of some long, extended dream. It would explain the way the shadows crawl, the way she keeps seeing the mark from her tetanus shot reappear, even though it really should have faded by now.

She keeps seeing... things. Harmless things, like superpositions of coordinate axes on her homework, glowing white when she thinks about cross products. Parabolas describe estimated trajectories when her roommate hurls her violin across the room to shatter to kindling.

The instrument is completely intact the next morning. Her roommate looks at her with concern and - recognition?

"You too?" she whispers, before dissolving into downy white feathers.

Blink. Breathe. The bedroom is empty.

Her roommate is gone. Something in the arrangement of the furniture tells her it wasn't willingly.

No. The room itself. The echo of her silent scream, pressed into the air.

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5

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They're hurting us.

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6

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She finds a terminal, connects to the Cortex, and types "paranoid schizophrenia."

NO SEARCH RESULTS.  
>I HATE YOU.<p>

She screams and swings the violin at the screen until the splinters seep into her fingers and spray all over the terminal. Until she stops seeing the graphical representation of the capacitance of the wood smashing into the touch display, and WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME

The faceless guards pinion her arms to her sides and take her away.

Two by two. Hands of blue.

The violin is screaming.

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7

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A new room, as if they can hide her, the girl, the violin, with bare concrete walls, ugly clothes, and uncomfortable mattresses.

There are pinpricks all over her skin now, all along the major points in her spine. Damn neurobiology. Physics is better. You can listen to the heartbeat of the 'Verse, instead of the children you've taken. Physics is honest. Physics doesn't do this to us.

The doctors. The philosophers. They are the wrong kind of doctor.

They don't feel anything when they put the needles in, or when she screams their mothers' names, or when she pretends to be their dead sisters. When she begs for mercy.

Her brother is a doctor. Sometimes he stands beside her, whispering, "It'll be all right, mei mei," when it clearly won't be right, ever again. Sometimes he says, "I'm not coming."

She can't control the laugh that burbles from her mouth. Burble. Babble. A babbling brook. It makes her giggle, and then cry.

Her roommate is here somewhere. She can see it in the smears of misery daubed all over the nurses, the guards still on edge from being clawed by her outstretched fingers. She hears her stream-of-consciousness pour riddles into her dreams through the concrete.

The doctors want to cut. The mattress told me, she says.

When she stops speaking, the hall is particularly agitated. Someone passed through here fighting tooth and nail, straining the straps to gouge out eyes. Someone was mad, blind, spitting with rage and terror.

Later, someone passed through here on her way to the morgue.

The day after, she looks into the doctor's eyes and says, "You're doing such good work," before the anaesthesia kicks in and it's her turn.

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8

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I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU

no i dont

come back

please

I'LL KILL YOU

dont leave me alone

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9

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Awareness.

She lolls bonelessly in the straps, reeling under waves of something that blot out her identity. A perfect operation. She's the best one so far.

Special. It makes her smile. A wide, toothy smile. She bulges her eyes for effect, and squirms with delight when the self-congratulation judders with fear.

Somebody thinks of her roommate spasming on the table, so she follows suit, delighted by the bird chatter and flustered flapping. Notes of despair and worry and I'm going to lose my job and YES YOU FOOLS COWER BEFORE ME.

It's a marvelous game, but it's a game she can't win, because the monitor beeps steadily, and she can't die. She's the best one so far.

She's the best.

Splendid.

After the back of her head stops feeling tender, they roll her to an unfamiliar room. They unbind her enough that one forearm can rotate, and put a gun in her hand.

Before they can think, she swivels, points, fires. The guards don't even flinch. They ignore her as she squeezes the trigger ineffectively, and switch on the holograms with clean blue gloves.

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10

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A nightmare of eternal waking.

Crawl gasping out of one dream of needles and masks, and dive headlong into the next, and the next, and the next. Nothing is real except the dance.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

She stops screaming long enough to roll her eyes back in her head, so that she can look up up up through the steel and concrete. To pierce the secrets and see him stagger into the free air, ears clogged with regurgitated protein. Behind him, they shout nonsense in Dutch, waiting for him to lie down.

Keep running. Don't let them catch you.

Yes. Good luck.

I SEE A SKY AND A LONG THIN CLOUD AND A BIRD AND A FREEDOM.

She dreams almost happily for a while.

The hands of blue bring him back, kicking and screaming. Behind the soundproof transparisteel, they flick open a silvery pen, and liquidize his precious brain in front of all of them.

The worst nightmare yet, in a long series of nightmares. Some of them never wake from their comas.

She claws her way back to the light and the needles and the masks, because she is the best.

She won't lie down.

Irrational, but the breathing soul in the construct will be nothing else.

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11

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Daddy?

Simon?

I'm sorry to bother you, but -

I love -

physics

- and dancing

- except when you hurt people.

Take me home.

I love

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end

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_Optionally concurrent with the R. Tam Sessions._

_I don't know why, but I am unsatisfied with this story. Any suggestions for improvement? Scenes that should or shouldn't have been included? Any feedback would be massively appreciated. Thanks for dropping by!_

_- Lena_


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